Today’s announcement via Mashable that social media lingo has joined the official lexicon of the Oxford English Dictionary is more evidence that “the times they are a changin'” and that social media is mainstream.

Among the new entries are Twittersphere, Facebook , permalink, paperless, lifehack and lappy.

As a marketer by profession, I need to stay on top of all these trends whether or not I use them in my personal life. I first started this blog to understand how it works and how to share. I joined Twitter for the same reason. Now, we’ve moved on to Foursquare, Yowza and all the daily groupon clones that propagate like rabbits in my inbox. We Yelp, google place, adword , gps, text and skype in the name of communicating and still the options rise like a red tide suffocating my days with ways to communicate more and more about less and less.

I’m tired. I miss getting real birthday cards in the mail. I want recommendations for books and movies from my friends not from algorithms. I want the phone to ring and have a ping -pong of real conversation rather than a deathless text trail. I miss the pre-social media days when we actually were social.

The OED may be the official source of what we’re talking about these days…but ZOMG,  I do miss real language. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much?” “Methinks not!

Related articles

• Rep. Anthony Weiner: The Twittersphere and the congressman – latimes.com (policyabcs.wordpress.com)
• ZOMG, NSFW Added to Oxford Dictionary (webpronews.com)
• ZOMG! Schmick Words Added to the Oxford English Dictionary (linearfix.wordpress.com)
• New Oxford Dictionaries Online Entries Will Have Techies Abuzz (pcworld.com)
• Oxford is No Longer the Arbiter of the English Language (mediabistro.com)
• ZOMG! ‘NSFW,’ ‘Twittersphere’ Join the Oxford Dictionary (newsfeed.time.com)